The Distributed Nature of Software Development - a comparison of three development approaches

Much change has undergone the environment in which software development takes place. To a greater extent, we are experiencing a distributed development environment. In this paper, three approaches to distributed software development are identified and explored – global software development (GSD), open source software development (OSS) and community-based software development (CSD). In a comparison of these, it is argued that the approaches embrace differences that are important to take into consideration for companies entering the distributed environment of software development. This paper suggests that these differences are related to the dimensions of (1) nature of development approach, (2) communication structure, and, (3) coordination mechanisms.